My recent invitation to MONSTRA Animation Film Festival in Lisboa lead to me reminiscing on animation and drawing. Hell, it’s been fun. Although…
Why would anyone want to animate? Endless work results in – if any – mild appreciation. Production can be a hellscape and then projects get abandoned more often than charger cables on hotel nightstands. And even if you manage to finish and be proud of a piece of animated work, you still have to face the whole “isn’t that only for children”-mindset of people; yes, this is still a thing. So why cause oneself and colleagues so much anguish?
So maybe you like to draw. Maybe you like drawing a lot. I like drawing a lot, I even like drawing a lot a lot. I remember sitting in my grandma’s room, Knäckebrot with thick layers of butter next to me, and how I filled up seemingly infinite pages of company scrap paper from the local steelwork firm “Eisenwagner” with surely thousands of drawings, comic panels and such.
Oh, how I loved those pink and torquise colored pages, the boring side covered in shipping orders, transit slips or enigmatic number sequences. For all I know they could have contained the Theory of Everything. I just needed the empty backsides to depict as many crude characters punching each other as possible. I didn’t like a stroke? New page. Therefor the notion of drawing a great number of similar pictures never was off-putting to me. It was daily routine.
There are many ways to animate anyway. You might be an animator yourself without knowing it. Whoever has made shadow figures with their hands onto a wall or a GIF out of a sequence of photos – of a friend getting hit in the face by a ball or something similarly glorious – has animated. I myself started with video games. I was 14 and collaborated with a technical school in Linz and we made a sort of learning point-and-click adventure game. Character Design and horrible walk cycles, that’s how it begins.
"YOU might be an animator yourself without knowing it."
Then I spent my 20s and most of my time writing – Books, stories, articles, song lyrics – and made live action shorts. Some sweet DIY animation worth mentioning was this stop motion music video I shot for my pal Martin (kicking ass currently with his great musical project Diamond Seas). Working as a social media manager – whatever that’s supposed to be – in the 2010s me and my colleagues got some freedom to create humorous DIY videos for clients, long before TikTok. And some of those short format videos were stop motion also and some even animated frame by frame. Some even were pixel art animation.
That brings me to a grand return to drawing and animation with another adventure game “The Funny Boneyard”. It has a great demo release and the full game should be finished in the near future, at least before “GTA VI” was the co-creator’s Andreas Capek’s goal. Fingers crossed! Writing this game and animating all the cartoony pixels was extremely satisfying and meant a dream come true for me, a lifelong adventure game fan.
There are also many ways we can animate digitally, from Procreate, Aseprite, LOOOM, Toon Boom, AE and the dozens I am forgetting. For a project headed by Yashar Sobhiafshar I used a mix of vector graphics done in Illustrator and then animated in After Effects. Here I threw together many rather unconventional workflows combined with odd effects on water, light and camera movement. It did not feel as comfortable classic animation, but the resulting short “INSIDE SUN” still turned out really nice.
At Moshel Film, a Viennese production house responsible for Sundance winner “Metube” and back then home to producer, writer and friend, Eugen Klim, I learned a lot about making things happen – in a production sense, but also regarding the tools. Eugen introduced me to so much of the software now essential for my work, like Da Vinci’s Fusion, AE and most notably Blender 3D. Sure enough a my phase of dabbling in 3D animation followed.
3D is something my dear friends and colleagues from Bounty.Studio really excel at – 2D animation as well of course. Working right next to them – and sometimes even with them –, Inni, Freudi and Erika taught me a lot and helped even more with getting my own obtuse animation ideas off the ground. For a live action short (“Paratherapie” / “Odd Couple’s Therapy”) I set myself a high bar and went for photorealistic creature animation.
After soul-, self worth- and creativity-crushing years in advertising agencies and creating only “sellable content” that oughta be trending I got canned twice. So I founded my own business – which I planned to do in any case – and being my own boss then enabled me to do something special: Drawing a lot… a lot… again. I made a super short Landjäger Kürzestfilm Festival and won a jury prize with it – some others too I think. A blinking toy of my daughter gave me the idea for a tiny club full of insect excess. Of course I had to bring this vision to life.
Blender’s great 2D animation feature called Grease Pencil came in handy here and opened up a whole new way of creating frame by frame animated joy for me. Finally I had a good workflow that wasn’t so time- and energy-intensive. With this new way to produce animation fast while still maintaining a classic look I again went on to draw – you guessed it – a lot. Storyboards and concept art go into Blender and we are off to the races drawing, arranging, editing and even sculpting keyframes. This is the way. For me. For now at least.
The collaborations with Yashar, Martin, Andreas, also colleagues like Sandra Rak – more recently Stefanie Vuga, Theres Einhauer and Felix Goldberg on a awesome WIP thing – showed me something important: Workloads and a vision can be shared. They should be, because only then new and more exciting stuff can emerge, the stuff you could have never imagined and come up with just on your own. Fuck the auteur myth. The work itself is so much more rewarding when it happens together. I had always been a loner hermit when it came to creating art. But through collaborating I got to see what I lack and that it’s OK to not be perfect. Let’s make our bad- and wonkyness into an edge we have!
Speaking of coming together and sharing things, the already mentioned Sebastian “Freudi” Freudenschuss and I made a series of animated promo clips for our KINO TIME SHARE KLUB events. There we screen random underground as well as high-end short films to give artists and filmmakers an offline platform for their work to be seen, appreciated and applauded. This idea originated also because of me being part of the curated HELLAVISION music short collection called “Track Attack” (with a rather simple stupid clip and composition at around 1:25:43 min, but they liked it haha). Those people are so great, not at all commercially calculating. They just have a lot of love for weird filmmaking. That needs to be celebrated and emulated – everyone do it!
Oh, and other than “Track Attack” there was more musically inspired fun to be had. Because Bob Dylan’s voice in “You Belong to Me” to me always sounded like a cute alien bard, again this mental image had to be animated. I used a combination of 3D cell shaded animation and 2D. Hey, to animate basically literally means give life to. So whatever dumb little idea rolls around in your head, it can be made reality through animation. Yes, that’s what a minor god complex could sound like – everyone, bow before me!
The mentioned KTSK-events and established workflows with Blender Grease Pencil lead to more promo clip work for Vienna’s oldest cinema, Breitenseer Lichtspiele. I came up with a bird character and made him go through some adventures. Can’t wait for the next one.
As I am jotting down these words on my notepad a plane is taking me to Lisbon Portugal, to an animation festival MONSTRA 2026. This is the true reason for this chaotic blog post and best of collection, this entire reminiscing about making moving pictures. I was so lucky to be invited to that incredibly cool festival and feel honoured. It’s also funny to me that the short that had gotten me the invitation was “Super Flex”, about a girl that is so strong it’s scary.
Before making the short I had watched way too much anime. Fascinated by its ability to produce magic by sometimes only using four looped frames, I wanted to try my luck at this trickery.
It is quite funny to me, that of all the shorts this one made me debut on the international animation film stage and got me a proper invite. It’s basically a longwinded – heh – dumb childish joke. To the credit of Monstra, they revealed themselves not to be arrogant nor too high brow. I loved them. They even got me a room in Hotel Florida, number 321 “The Seven Samurai” suite. Please don’t ask, why a randomly film themed hotel is called Florida. I wondered myself.
So after decades of feeling like a hack- and wannabe-filmmaker I got a tiny piece of recognition by such a diverse network of peers, and it felt very nice. So nice I’d like to give as many people as possible the same feeling. Maybe we already did with KINO TIME SHARE KLUB in some way.
I’ve heard it said recently that the 90s to 2000s were a Golden Age of animation. I think that’s true – being aware of my obvious confirmation bias. In a time others distanced themselves from animated tv-shows in their pre-teens and teens for wanting to appear more mature I almost exclusively watched cartoons and animation. Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, certain MTV programming, saturday morning animation, those were the bright lights in my early life. I watched it all.
“Adventure Time” *praised be ye*, “Cow and Chicken”, “Lucky Luke”, “The Smurfs”, “Ren and Stimpy”, “Pumuckl”, “Dexter’s Laboratory” – Genndy Tartakovsky still killing it –, “Rocko’s Modern Life”, “Sendung mit der Maus”, “Spongebob” and so much anime it could be its own series of essays here.
"Let's make the next Golden Age – or another material themed name – the DUCT TAPE AGE OF ANIMATION together!"
But come to think of it, the 30s to 50s had their Merry Melodies and Loony Tunes and must not be snubbed. Please read Chuck Jones’s bio “Chuck Amuck” what a funny read by a lovely guy. Hey, and the 60s to 80s had game changers like Moebius, the Franco-Belgian master pieces, “Fritz the Cat”, “Werner Beinhart” and the dawn Japanese and US-cartoons like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, “He-Man” and whatnot flooding the cartoon programs. Clearly those were just big toy-selling commercials, but still life giving to the animation love of many and still vital in their influence to today’s artists.
So let’s just say, there’s always fantastic work being produced in animation. And it doesn’t have to be over. To unify some mentioned topics: Come on, find a method to animate that works for you, get together with others and start working on those ideas this collaboration incubates! Let’s return here in a year: 15. April 2027 and we show each other what we made. I am so motivated – or maybe too much coffee. Let’s make the next Golden Age – or another material themed name – the next Duct Tape Age of Animation together!
Josef Zorn